Fresh hacks every day
We love old display technology, like Nixie tubes, but they’re often difficult to work with because they require higher voltages than digital logic. Vacuum florescent displays (VFD) fall into this category. While not necessarily “old”, they are becoming far less common than LCDs. The main benefit of a VFD is that it actually produces light directly; it … Read the rest
We mentioned Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) when talking about [sprite_tm]‘s marquee control. It’s a method of power control. While [sprite_tm] did it in software, [Afroman] sent along a very straight forward introduction to PWM using just a 555. Check out his video for coverage of this fundamental electrical design technique.… Read the rest
In a previous job, [sprite_tm] was responsible for wrangling many different LED text ad marquees. The hardware was fairly simple and he always figured they could be pushed much further with a little work. He recently acquired ten 32×16 LED displays a decided to see what he could do with them. By the end of the project, he had … Read the rest
Our flickering LED circuit combined two known circuit, and certainly wasn’t graceful because of it. [sprite_tm] saw quite a few areas where the circuit could be reduced. He ended up taking it down to just two LEDs, a battery, and an ATtiny13. The first step was getting rid of the current limiting resistors. The datasheet shows that with a … Read the rest
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